Tunisia Islamists seek jihad in Syria with one eye on home

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(Hayet Saadi, mother of Aymen Saadi, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Tunis November 13, 2013. REUTERS/Anis Mili )

Aymen Saadi’s brief call to jihad began with dreams of fighting for an Islamic state in Syria and ended with a botched suicide bombing attempt in a crowd of foreign tourists in Tunisia.

Guards tackled the Tunisian teenager before he detonated his bomb at a presidential mausoleum last month south of Tunis. Minutes earlier, a fellow bomber had blown himself up into a bloody mess across the sand at a popular beach resort a few kilometres away.

Saadi’s mission may have failed, and the beach bomber killed only himself, but Tunisia’s first suicide attack in a decade was shock enough for the small North African nation; the war with militant Islam was at its door.

Saadi might not have reached Syria’s battlefields, but his journey from middle-class student to would-be suicide bomber reveals how far that conflict has become a clarion call for homegrown jihadists.

The bloodshed in Syria – as in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s and Iraq in the past decade – is drawing young foreign recruits into Islamist militant ranks only to spit them back out again to return home hardened by fundamentalist fervour and war.

Saadi now sits in a Tunisian jail, but his case and those of other Tunisian jihadists are a warning about how militants, many trained in Libyan camps and dispatched to battles in Aleppo and Idlib, may come back to haunt North Africa.